Two major groups that represent publishers in the United States and around the world sent letters to the US government on 18 December opposing any policy that would mandate immediate open access. The publishers told the administration that such a move would hinder the peer-review process, stifle innovation, and tip the publishing business into chaos.

According to the widely-discussed rumor, whose origin is unclear, the administration of President Donald Trump is drafting an executive order that would force the change in publishing practices. This would follow an effort led by European funders, called Plan S, which will require that research they fund be open access immediately on publication, with creative commons licensing terms.

But requiring a similar policy for studies funded by the United States government would “effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that is produced and forced us to give it away to the rest of the world for free”, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Washington DC wrote to President Donald Trump. More than 125 publishers and scientific societies signed the letter, including the American Chemical Society, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the publishing giants Elsevier and Wiley.

It is not clear whether the rumored US policy would mirror Plan S, or merely mandate that research be made free to read. Also, Kristina Baum, a spokesperson for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, declined to comment on whether the government was considering changing its open-access policy.

Reaction of Scientific Community

The potential policy change, has fueled the fierce debate between scientists who favor open-access publishing and publishers of subscription journals, many of whom publish some open-access work but say they would struggle to make their business sustainable if all papers were published this way. That debate has intensified over the last year, as publishers and funders have negotiated over the proposal for Plan S.

In 2013, President Barack Obama’s administration introduced a policy that requires taxpayer-funded research to be made freely available online within 12 months of its publication in a journal. But several scientists who advocate for open access say the current policy does not go far enough, and they countered the publishers’ arguments against the changes the White House is said to be considering.

“I really doubt that most of those scientific and medical organizations made any attempt to poll their members about this issue,” says Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “They presume that they can speak for all members, but on this issue, I think they are speaking directly against the interests of their members.”

“I welcome the rumored policy,” tweeted John Wilbanks, the chief commons officer at the non-profit research organization Sage Bionetworks in Seattle, Washington. “I work at a really “well-funded” non-traditional research organization. We still can’t afford journal access subscriptions.”